H0ek's Journal: What tech doth yonder geek screweth with?

It's been a busy year for me so far, technically. I've come back (after several years away) to Debian and, as is obvious to all those Debian users, it rocks. I forgot how glorious apt-get was (or perhaps it was so long ago it wasn't very glorious). Now I run a laptop and two desktop machines on Debian.

Also, one of the sites that I do little odd-n-ends for has asked for spam filtering. That's something I haven't played with much, so I decided to stick SpamAssassin on their e-mail server. I've even written a nifty little shell script to help train the filter. Now I just have to find some magical way to train the e-mail users to forward their message to the filter. Eh, they're busy in their own little world. I'll give 'em time (like, when they start complaining that they get too much spam).

But that's such a little problem, compared to the e-vile monster that sits at home. I've taken it upon myself to convert my loving family from WinXP to Linux (Debian, of course). My wife is the major stumbling block here, as she despises change. Fortunate for her, I've had her using the Mozilla browser and e-mail program for nine months, now. Since those are the only programs she really uses, it should be a piece of cake to transistion her.

So clearly that is not my problem. The problem is that I am using a Netgear MA101 Rev B USB network adapter. Worked great on a Gentoo machine, but it has been hell trying to get this thing working under Debian. The last month has been spent rebuilding the driver, loading it and trying to get a ping to my wireless router. Isn't happening. One strange thing, though. Seems that depmod reports there are unresolved symbols in the driver. Odd, that it seem to load without any complaints. I found that just this morning, so when I get home tonight, I'll install the complete kernel sources, build 'em, install 'em and try to build, install and run the Atmel drivers again.

Because I imagine myself to be a good netizen, I'll post the result of my attempt tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Oh, yeah, got my diploma. I've spent my nine years prostrate before the higher mind and now I'm free.

To do what, I wonder.

Perhaps I'll take up piano.